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There's something that kinda fascinates me about those elaborate gnostic divine hierarchies where the highest God -- who is unimaginably remote -- first emanates a bunch of lesser powers, who then emanate another level of powers and so on until you get down to the demiurgic creator of our own world who exists on a fairly low level of the divine ecosystem. I guess all these intermediate layers of divinity appeal to me because of the way they kind of create a sense of scale regarding the true vastness of the divine realm and the power and majesty attributed to the ultimate God. It's like those astronomical comparisons that try to help you visualize the immensity of space by explaining that so many thousand Earths could fit inside Jupiter, and so many Jupiters inside the sun and so on -- telling you to imagine something impossibly huge, and then to imagine something so huge it makes the first thing look miniscule in comparison, in order to give you that mindblowing feeling of "omg space is so big!!" Similarly these divine hierarchies are like: "Oh yeah, that god who created our whole universe and could crush us with a thought -- the one who maybe other sects say is Top God? He's actually the lowest man on the cosmic totem pole; there exist gods as high above him as he is above us puny mortals. And even they aren't the greatest gods out there..."

IDK even though I don't believe in any of it I guess aesthetically I just prefer a sense of the divine that's actually massive and awesome and incomprehensible over the aspects of religion that try really hard to make God Almighty #relatable to human beings.

(But maybe I also kind of think of this stuff as just a metaphor for the actual nature of Ultimate Reality, which is in fact huge and incomprehensible and non-anthropocentric when you're not viewing it from a religious angle.)

#you can still have relatable divinities they just exist on a lower level #i need to learn more about actual polytheistic religions tbh #religion

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Another quote from the same book:

Around him cameras were clicking as they were carried past the controversial memorial statue of John F. Kennedy, an heroic nude more than fifty meters high, molded of gleaming polymers; the figure balanced a representation of the Moon in one hand and held a rocket aloft like a sword in the other.

Amazing.

From the 70s SF novel I'm reading (The Jupiter Theft by Donald Moffitt):

More than a hundred of them were milling noisily in the narrow aisles: tourists returning from Mare Imbrium and Eurostation’s vacation inn, lunies, scientific and support personnel. They clutched their little souvenir packs with the ounce of Moon rock and the bottle of vacuum, and called back and forth to one another.

The idea of bringing back a bottle of vacuum as a souvenir from space is deeply appealing to me somehow (it would be a nice addition to my collection lol). I googled around to see if anything like that had actually been done, and it turns out it has!

#what i'm reading

[lloke]

From the 70s SF novel I'm reading (The Jupiter Theft by Donald Moffitt):

More than a hundred of them were milling noisily in the narrow aisles: tourists returning from Mare Imbrium and Eurostation’s vacation inn, lunies, scientific and support personnel. They clutched their little souvenir packs with the ounce of Moon rock and the bottle of vacuum, and called back and forth to one another.

The idea of bringing back a bottle of vacuum as a souvenir from space is deeply appealing to me somehow (it would be a nice addition to my collection lol). I googled around to see if anything like that had actually been done, and it turns out it has!

#what i'm reading

[lloke]

I grew up in a family with four kids, where the first three of us especially were very close in age (just a little over a year apart). We always got along really well and I have a lot of fond childhood memories of all the games we played together etc. So even though I totally understand why people are having fewer kids these days, and often putting a larger gap between them since that makes it much easier on the parents..... there is a part of me that's a little sad that fewer people nowadays are going to have the kind of experience and the kind of sibling relationships that I had growing up.

#of course having kids close in age doesn't guarantee they'll like each other #but i'm talking statistically #personal

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Most of my current collection of Cool Nature Stuff In Jars (plus some things that wouldn't fit in jars):

It's basically all stuff that I collected from nature, except for the big jars of snakeshed on the right which are from my pet snake lol.

Also: human teeth!

Specifically, my own baby & wisdom teeth -- just bc I think it's cool and witchy to have bottles of human teeth on display lol.

#nature stuff #occult bullshit #fake witchery

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My favorite Fake Witchcraft activity is Collecting Cool Nature Stuff and Putting It In Jars. Latest cool find: a rabbit's tail.

#fake witchery #occult bullshit #nature stuff #vulture culture #animal death cw

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Had a dream where I was playing a card game similar to Resistance/Avalon but based on A Night in the Lonesome October, which is actually a pretty cool idea

#a night in the lonesome october #dreams

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Creature doodles from when I was in college

#i'm not an artist but i think i can do an ok doodle

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I currently have just over 1200 books listed as read on Goodreads. If I keep reading at my current rate (and assuming an average lifespan), I'll have time to read about 2500 more before I die. Which isn't so bad, I guess.

#so many books so little time #there are only 762 books on my to-read list... so technically i might be able to read all of them #but the list keeps growing faster than i can check them off

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I was thinking about how odd it is that some baby animals like puppies and kittens are so much cuter than human babies -- shouldn't evolution make us love our own babies best? But then I realized the kind of puppies and kittens I was thinking of are actually several weeks old and more equivalent to a human toddler -- which IS in fact the cutest human development stage -- while actual newborn puppies and kittens are just kind of squirmy little blobs which aren't that much cuter than human newborns really. So that tracks I guess.

#why are toddlers cuter than babies? i don't know #maybe because infant mortality was originally so high that it made sense for the parents to invest more resources #into the kids that had already survived a year or two

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Had an interesting dream last night. There was a bunch of stuff going on in it, but the interesting part had something to do with there being these different dimensional realities that you could travel between, like a 2D reality and a 3D reality -- where the 3D reality was somehow "more real" or was a higher level of existence than the 2D reality. I don't remember the 2D reality actually looking noticeably different from the 3D reality visually or anything? But somehow I just knew that it was a "flatter" or simpler form of reality in some vaguely-defined way.

But there was also a third reality that was higher-dimensional still, and involved an existence that was in some way even more real or complex than 3D reality, and it had this mystical-sounding name like "Kava" or something, and you could enter it through a portal that existed in the 3D reality. And I avoided looking through the portal or approaching it too closely because it seemed like if you got too close you would be kind of sucked through it or something; but I watched other people approaching and passing through it, and when they got near to the portal there would be this weird visual effect, sort of like that thing in sci-fi TV shows when they want to show that a "weird temporal effect" is happening, where the different moments of the person's approach or movement toward the portal would sort of flash back and forth as if they were momentarily "stuck in time", before they would disappear. But this was accompanied by a dramatic visual/mental effect that I can't really describe now, except that it felt very intense even to watch it, and gave me some vague idea of how intense the transition to the higher-level reality would be to actually experience. And I knew that I should probably go through the portal, since a bunch of people including my family members had already gone, but I was afraid of what it would do to me and of how intense and alien the experience would be.

But when I finally entered the portal all I saw was blackness, as if perhaps the higher reality didn't really exist after all (or more likely my dreaming brain just wasn't able to generate any image of what it would really look like, so just failed to produce anything at all) -- and then I woke up. And immediately thought: well of course, I was dreaming, and the "higher reality" relative to a dream is just real life. So of course going through the portal would cause me to wake up.

#dreams

[lloke]

From my personal info printed on a form at the dr's office.... accurate.

#i am extremely cis

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Tbh aroaces are even more privileged than regular straight people bc we get all the advantages of being viewed as straight/exempt from homophobia but without all the headaches of being in an actual hetero relationship. Truly the best of both worlds.

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I find it kinda baffling that "little person" is apparently the currently-accepted polite term for a person with dwarfism, because to me it just sounds so horribly cutesy and condescending. I mean I get why they don't want to be called dwarfs either, and maybe there aren't any really good options. But still.

#not that it's any of my business ofc #hot takes i guess

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I think I became an atheist at almost the exact right time in my life: I was an adult and only a couple of years away from moving out of my parents' house, so I didn't have to spend too long uncomfortably faking Christianity for them every day (or else enduring their daily judgment and disappointment if I told the truth); but I was still young enough that I didn't end up wasting any significant portion of my adult life on a belief system that I would end up abandoning. Not everyone who leaves a religion ends up having the timing work out as conveniently as that.

#religion

[lloke]

I mentioned this before but like after my brother died I read through his journals and stuff and found myself relating to a lot of the stuff he said about Christianity and his anger and frustration with it (but simultaneous fear to abandon it), and like.... a part of me still feels mad that I never tried to talk to him about any of that stuff and missed out on a chance to offer him some kind of support or just bond with him a little over some things we had in common because I was too busy "respecting religion" and "the importance of faith" and how he totally needed it to be happy or whatever and I shouldn't damage his mental health further by infecting him with my dirty atheism -- and then all that shit turned out to be completely useless garbage that didn't help him at all anyway!!

Of course I realize realistically that if I had made any attempt to have this kind of conversation with him he almost certainly would have still killed himself and then I would have had to blame myself for not keeping my distance, so there really wasn't any way to win there. But what's really frustrating is that now I feel like I'm in a very similar position with respect to my OTHER brother (who I will call A).

A also has bad anxiety and OCD that he's been struggling a lot with lately, and a while ago when I was over at my parents' house he had this kinda breakdown but felt better after Mom reassured him with a lot of "God is looking out for you" stuff, because (according to Mom) it's his faith in God that really gets him through everything... and like I'm glad he has something that helps him, but hearing that made me feel kinda awkward/guilty about the discussion/polite debate Dad and I somehow got into subsequently about Biblical source criticism shit. Like once again I feel like I can't express my real views on things because it might threaten the terribly delicate and fragile belief system that my brother absolutely needs to cope with his mental illness and could not possibly live without.

And I feel like Dad also isn't helping this situation at all... like for Christmas he gave A this "Rational Bible" book which like... I haven't read but I can guess the kind of stuff that's probably in it (defense of the Bible's historical accuracy etc). And I know his intention is to help strengthen A's faith, but I feel like this is just such a bad move on Dad's part. Like if A really needs his Christian faith for comfort and to cope with his anxiety and shit, I think the LAST thing you should be telling him is "Your faith in a loving God should definitely hinge on the historical accuracy of the number of chariots King David took to war in 1 Chronicles 18 -- and by the way, there happens to be A LOT of controversy over that very topic, and you should definitely spend a lot of time dwelling on this controversy and reading about all the arguments over it, that'll be sure to ease your anxieties!"

argh

#family #religion #brain problems #suicide cw

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